Accepting donations has a long tradition, not only spanning the web but also for the first project we/I did back in the days: When cipha.net launched in late 2001, due to the fact that it was a non-commercial project, I as a writer found that it was a legitimate way to “earn” money via PayPal. Things didn’t work out the way I hoped, but PayPal is still accepted there as on other older projects I did, e.g. zockerseele.com, our video games news site which still is alive and kicking today.

After that, there was a huge time gap.

In late 2012/early 2013 we also started to support Flattr, not only because it’s a great European idea and we wanted to show respect for this neat sharing-&-caring-system, but also because it is more subtle than these (often) very annoying banners hanging around on all of those websites in general.

And yeah, maybe we were also infected by the Bitcoin-Hype 2013 which will probably never happen again, but we also think it’s simply just a good thing to have a reliable cryptocurrency in existence; it’s for the hackers and us cyberpunks as well as the whole Internet a very very interesting way of payment and we thought it is finally the time to show some respect as well.

Besides Flattr, right now the following projects support Bitcoins and we hope you will join the game too:

It is always the same “agency” which is disturbing the blogger subculture here for no reason for years now. Unofficial estimates say they sent out 500-600 take down letters. Since January. Which makes it one of the most foul & most consequent campaigns against independent online writers _ever_ here in this strange European country.

To be clear: This is no serious business. Rumors have it that this agency scans weblog archives over and over and over again in hunting down the one picture/graphic/photo which is not referenced correctly and/or has gone viral after some bloggers mentioned it in an article. The next step seems to be that they obtain the rights for it, long after the content has gone viral, and sue the authors, claiming not only the freshly obtained rights but also suing even the smallest blogs for thousands of Euros.

Some of these authors are scared and close the blogs directly. Others simply have no money to defend themselves. In other cases an author simply is not able to sent back the declaration to cease and desist on time and runs into much bigger problems. Also, when sending back the default letter the agency sends you as an attachment you need to sign, you not only give up the rights to them for the next 30(!) years, but also are in danger being fined for another round of thousands of Euros. It’s an evil circle. A circle artificially created because German law to this date simply does not know or has any interest in creating safe harbors for shared content on the Internet.

Because, you know, as Chancellor Merkel already said: “The Internet is virgin territory for us all”. This was shortly after the Guardian revealed the extensive NSA snoopings going on for years. Yeah. Welcome to the “New World”! What a brave human you need to be in this world…

This character was only available from March 24, 2011 until April 7, 2011.

So it should be clear who was first.

When we started this project, we wanted a name that would be original, never used somewhere else or just copied. Well, it seems it is time again to face reality: In this huge web, it is almost impossible to reserve or even invent a term. Someone somewhere will borrow/use/copy it.

The first thing you will surely recognize is this huge URL. Unfortunately we won’t get a smart address until we attracted 25 fans minimum. So, it’s time to give us your thumbs up! We included the notorious “Like”-button under every text, to make things fast & sexy.

In the future you will get all our news directly inside your Facebook-stream. You can also comment and share the entries from this particular page. So it should be easier to stay in touch with our supporters, fans & clients.

Of course you will also find our “Kura”-symbol there. As we said in one of our earliest posts, it represents our philosophy entirely.

The graphic we used there is from a guy named troley. It is called “cyberpunk awesome” and is attributed with a Creative Commons-license. To visit his galery on flickr, see: http://flickr.com/photos/torley/4294987703/. He has a lot of great cyberpunk stuff online.

This is it, for now. Read next month: How we made it into an RPG-Facebook-game. Believe us: We didn’t see that coming.

So long, the aethyx-staff

[Update, 02.10.12]

As of now we got a smart URL for AETHYX MEDIAE – Independent Online Publishing on Facebook!

As of today we are into distributed computing on the PlayStation 3 console. You can join our team

aethyx coven 21

anytime. We would be happy to see you doing folding@home when you are not playing on your PS3.

Happy calculating!

All the best, aethyx-staff

[update I, 09.07.10]

Unfortunately Sony cancelled the application folding@home with their latest PS3-firmware-update. We don’t know why they are doing this, but since the release of the slim version the Japanese corporation is fucking this great console up. Ask geohot for more information. Sorry for the inconvenience, we are not responsible for this.